Through the years, I've had the pleasure of having Sony Xperia smartphones as my daily drivers. And if there's anything I can tell you about the legendary Japanese company's handsets - especially those in the midrange and flagship level categories - it's that they are ahead of the pack when it comes to design, construction, imaging capabilities, and touch response. It's really hard not to be an Xperia fan when you've experience the brand first hand.

And when I saw photos of the upcoming Sony Xperia C5 Ultra phablet - leaked and uploaded by the good folks at XperiaBlog just a few hours ago - I thought Sony has done it again. I mean, just look at it. Ain't it handsome?

For the first time, Sony crafted a phablet with an edge-to-edge, no-side-bezels display.

Although having a massive 6-inch Full HD IPS display, Sony Xperia C5 Ultra - by not having thick bezels framing its screen - is only about as wide as the Apple iPhone 6 Plus, which has 5.5 inch Full HD display panel.

For those who are wondering: The C-Series is Sony Xperia's line of handsets for mid-level consumers who are on the lookout for gorgeous smartphones with decent internal hardware, above average main camera, high resolution selfie cam with front facing soft LED flash, and a large screen putting the device well within the phablet bracket.

Sony Xperia C5 Ultra - or at least the white variant - has a glazed back cover design. Near the top, you will find the phablet's 13 MegaPixel autofocus camera with LED flash.

The main shooter is complemented by another 13 MegaPixel selfie cam in front with soft LED flash that allows the user to take bright and crisp self-portraits even with low to zero ambient light.

This photo depicts Sony Xperia C5 Ultra's One-Handed-Use mode, which comes in 'handy' given the sheer size of the device's display.

I mentioned 'decent internal hardware' above. And for that, the phablet has a 1.7 GHz MediaTek MT6752 chipset that incorporates eight ARM Cortex A53 CPUs and a Mali-T760 GPU, 2GB of RAM for multitasking, and 16GB of internal storage that you can augment using the C5 Ultra's microSD card expansion slot. One downside is that the device - they say - only has 2,930 mAh battery pack, which is rather small considering the size of the screen. It's probably one of the compromises that Sony had to make to keep both the heft and price of the phablet low.

According to XperiaBlog's insiders, Sony Xperia C5 Ultra will be officially announced by the company on August 3, 2015 and should hit store shelves in many key territories - hopefully, including the Philippines - within Q3 2015. As for its price, they say that this phablet should don an SRP in the range of $340 to $360 USD or roughly Php 15,500 to Php 16,450 with current conversion.